Assembled movement-by-movement to different commissions between 1992 and 2009, Pascal Dusapin’s Seven Solos is, he says, his attempt to produce a “complex form comprising seven autonomous episodes regenerating themselves from within”. The separately titled pieces have complex harmonic and melodic links, sometimes exploring the same material from different perspectives, sometimes continuing or even reversing musical processes begun in an earlier piece. The first, Go, is an exercise in melodic flexibility, the preoccupations of the third, Apex, are mostly harmonic, while the fifth, Exeo, seems to assemble itself from a whole collection of sharply contrasted ideas. Over the last decade or so, the wildness and fractured textures of Dusapin’s early pieces have been replaced by music of far greater continuity and traditional expressiveness. Though some of these seven pieces uncoil climaxes of savagery, there is a delicacy and refinement to much of the orchestral writing that sometimes recalls Dutilleux or other French composers of an earlier 20th-century generation.
By Andrew Clements
You can also read the article on The Guardian website.
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